When Wilma Robb was transferred from Parramatta Girls Training School to the notoriously brutal Institution for Girls in Hay as a 15-year-old, she vividly recalls being told what to expect.

“Welcome to Hay,” the officer told her. “We will either make you or break you. Your choice.”

The Hay isolation room. Photo: Supplied

Speaking at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Mrs Robb described the harsh discipline at the state-run jail as a psychological experiment.

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“It was designed to break the human spirit and it certainly did break the human spirit,” she said.

“Welfare said it was an experiment. Well, they need to be here to see what that experiment did to us girls. . . we're all screwed up. We can't live a normal life and never will.”

Girls as young as 13 were forced to perform hard physical labour, they had to look at the ground and were forbidden from speaking to each other.

Everything from food to toilet paper was strictly rationed.

The girls were forced to march everywhere and were severely punished if they did not sleep in the correct position on their right side with their hands visible.

She told the hearing before Justice Peter McClellan of being thrown into the isolation cell at Hay in the middle of winter and spending the entire night on a concrete floor, tearing out every single hair on her legs.

“I'd like to know what public servant could write those rules and expect someone to come out of a place like that undamaged,” she said.

Mrs Robb, a long time campaigner for people who endured abuse in state-run institutions, was in Parramatta Girls Training School and its maximum security annexe at Hay between 1962 and 1965.

The 67-year-old told the hearing of being physically and sexually assaulted at both Parramatta and Hay.

At Parramatta, she was beaten so badly by staff that all her teeth were shattered.

“They smashed my face into the sink of the shower block,” she said. “I was then told to clean up the mess. At the age of 15. I required full set of dentures.”

She said at Parramatta girls were forced to strip naked in front of staff and other inmates, and she was drugged with the strong sedative Largactil on a daily basis.

“Largactil made me feel like a zombie,” she said.

She said the child welfare system of the time failed the young people it was supposed to protect and called on the NSW Government to offer greater support to victims of abuse in state-run homes.

“It's time they fronted up as our guardians and looked after us,” she said.

Yvonne Kitchener spent almost four years at Parramatta Girls and Hay, saying the experience robbed her of her “pride and sanity”.

Now aged 58 and living on the Sunshine Coast she says her life has been ruined, as have the lives of her nine children, seven of whom do not talk to her.

“My children hate me,” she said. “They told me that if I die they won’t even spit on my grave . . .The way I was treated, I treated them the same.”

Ms Kitchener, who has battled drug addiction and mental health problems, recalled attending a reunion of Hay inmates in 2007.

“I went to the cell where I was raped,” she said. “It was so emotional being there.”

She also observed a plaque which is now laid outside the colonial jail.

It reads: ''Never let any child walk this path again.”

Coral Campbell was sent to Parramatta Girls at the age of 13 for wagging school. She was allegedly raped by two staff members, William Gordon, now deceased, and Ronald Ward, who is still alive and was the deputy superintendent in the early 1960s.

She recounted him allegedly putting her on the concrete floor of the room known as the dungeon.

“He did something to me that really, really hurt,” she said. “It really hurt. He got up swearing. There was some blood on me.”

Now 65 and living near Wollongong, Ms Campbell stayed silent about her experiences for more than 40 years.

“I walked through the big green doors of Parramatta Girls as a little girl and I came out of its big green gates a slut and a prostitute . . . that is what I was called,” she said.

The Royal Commission is examining the question of compensation for victims but Ms Campbell said it has never occurred to her to make a claim.

“What can money buy?” she asked. “It can’t bring back that little girl.”

The statement of Denise Luke, who was sent to Parramatta Girls as a pregnant 15-year-old in 1970, had people in tears. In the statement, which was read out to the hearing, she recalled horrendous sexual abuse by her foster parents followed by further physical and sexual assaults at Parramatta Girls while pregnant.